Ballots to remain uncounted in MI and Stein blocked in Philly. Guest: Election integrity, law expert Paul Lehto says this proves 'only option is to get it right on Election Night'. Also: Trump taps climate denier, fossil-fuel tool for EPA...

It took nearly a week of The BRAD BLOG bitching, moaning, emailing, complaining, and tweeting to the Washington Post, its ombudsman, and, of course, the author of the story, Alexandra Petri, who had blatantly misreported, twice in the same article at Dana Milbank's "Rough Sketch" blog, the long-ago debunked myth that Rightwing con-man and dirty trickster James O'Keefe had "dressed up as a pimp to interview members of ACORN" in his scam video tapes that shamefully took down the four-decade old anti-poverty, pro-democracy organization based on his hateful hoax.

As we detailed in our original report on Petri's inaccuracy last week, O'Keefe never dressed as a pimp and never even represented himself as a pimp in the offices of ACORN. The truth about all of that had been publicly available to know for almost a year before Petri misreported on it in the pages of the Washington Post last week.

Given that the Washington Post published another related story over a year ago with a number of similarly misleading inaccuracies in it, which they have yet to correct even after all this time, perhaps we should be happy it took less than a week this time around for the right thing to be done at the paper.

Petri has finally, nearly a week later, corrected her article, as she notes in the following email sent to us this morning...

I've just put in the correction you suggested. I apologize for the delay in response and appreciate your fidelity to the facts! Thanks for following me on Twitter!

I hope your focus on the inaccurate phrasing of those two sentences didn't come at the expense of noting the larger point of the piece, which does pointedly refer to Mr. O'Keefe's editing tendencies! Regardless, thank you for drawing my attention to this!

It was a "punk" set-up by James O'Keefe, the same guy who famously dressed up as a pimp to interview members of ACORN...
...
Remember, he dressed up as a pimp to interview members of ACORN.

...to this...

It was a "punk" set-up by James O'Keefe, the same guy who famously dressed up as a pimp to interview members of ACORN. dressed up as a pimp in a video where he also interviewed members of ACORN, then edited the footage to make it seem as though he had been in his pimp guise the whole time.

The repetition of the same inaccuracy later in the piece was removed all together, and a transparent, time-stamped correction was added to the bottom of the article.

We thank Ms. Petri for having done the right thing, even as it took far too long to have done so.

The proposition was outrageous, outlandish, and right up James E. O'Keefe III's alley. Hannah Giles was on the phone from the District, and she was asking him to dress like her pimp, walk into the offices of the ACORN community activist group, openly admit to wanting to buy a house to run as a brothel, and see what happened.

It was serendipity, O'Keefe said Thursday. On that day in May, he was still burning mad after watching a YouTube video of Acorn workers breaking padlocks off foreclosed homes and barging in. "I was upset," he said.

O'Keefe, 25, packed his grandfather's old wide-brimmed derby hat from his swing-dancing days, his grandmother's ratty chinchilla shoulder throw, and a cane he bought at a dollar store, then drove from his parents' home in northern New Jersey to the District to execute the idea with Giles, 20.

Except that he didn't. As we have since learned, all of that pimp stuff you saw in the videos was recorded later, and deceptively edited into the final project to deceive the nation and the media into believing those ACORN workers were just so stupid that they thought this skinny, 20-something white punk was actually a 70s-era Blaxploitation movie pimp.

The scam worked. Though you'd think the media, at least the legitimate non-wingnut media, as Washington Post is supposed to be, would have taken the time to correct the historical record by now once the truth of the scam had become known. They haven't.

The paper did see fit, however, to appease James O'Keefe --- who is decidedly not a "journalist", by the way --- by issuing the following "correction" at the top of that story...

CORRECTION TO THIS ARTICLE
This article about the community organizing group ACORN incorrectly said that a conservative journalist targeted the organization for hidden-camera videos partly because its voter-registration drives bring Latinos and African Americans to the polls. Although ACORN registers people mostly from those groups, the maker of the videos, James E. O'Keefe, did not specifically mention them.

As to posting a correction to the story to reveal that O'Keefe actually out-and-out lied to them, as seen in the inaccurate portions of the story quoted above, and as known since at least December of last year, no such correction has been forthcoming from the paper.

So we've successfully gotten corrections from the NYTimes, WaPo, Yahoo! News and a few others on all of this, though they wouldn't have made them in the first place with some responsible due-diligence. It really shouldn't be this hard to get these guys to do the right thing by publishing accurate journalism and then correcting the record when they are shown to have been wrong.

If WaPo ever corrects their blatantly inaccurate and misleading September 2009 story, we'll try to let you know.

BTW, I was going to harangue Petri on the comment section of Milbank's blog, but I decided it was not worth it to run the gauntlet of gratuitous personal information divulgence that they all seem to want these days.